Stephanie Burgis

My vacation joy is complete: I just got a phone call from PetStay, our local pet-sitting company, confirming that Maya will be able to stay in a family home while we're in Stockholm. Whew! Maya will be soooo much happier there than in a kennel, and Patrick and I will be happier in Stockholm knowing that she isn't lonely and scared while we're off having fun.

Now I can happily settle into fantasies of gorgeous Swedish kanalbulle (cinnamon rolls - omnipresent and soooooo delicious!) and 18th-century palaces. Perfect! And less than three weeks to wait. :)

In the meantime, I've been re-reading Patricia McKillip's Solstice Wood, which I like even more on the second reading. (The first reading was on a long plane trip, which is never a bonus for any book! I'm generally so exhausted and out of it by the end of the plane trip that whatever book I'm reading is lucky to have even half my mind focused on it.) It's a really lovely book, written with all the lyricism of her high fantasy novels, but with a really convincing modern American setting. (Actually, she does something really interesting there, because it's a kind-of sequel to her earlier book Winter Rose [which I adore], which was DEFINITELY a high fantasy novel...except that now it's being looked back on as real history. Very strange, and it shouldn't work but somehow really does...)

My single quibble with the book is one of my old standbys: I really hate it when writers toss in dogs (or other pets) as character-flavor without actually thinking through the lifestyle implications. The heroine's boyfriend Madison is a great guy, very responsible and caring, and partway through the book, the heroine thinks about all the wonderful things about him, including his sweet mixed-breed dog...and I thought, wait...what???? - because the book started with Madison sleeping over at the heroine's house, as usual, after a nice evening together, and there's no dog in sight! So I was left wondering: did he leave the dog at home alone for at least 14-16 hours? And is that his regular routine? In which case, he is really not the nice, responsible guy he's supposed to be... Or was it just that the idea of a dog for Madison was tossed in to show off his nice-guy-ness without actually thinking the implications through?

It was a really small niggle in a book that's genuinely wonderful overall - evocative, magical, and insightful about family relationships and misunderstandings - so I don't want to put anyone off the book by my ranting. Patricia McKillip is one of my favorite fantasy authors, hands-down. But I do wish authors wouldn't toss in dependent pets - or, for that matter, children (I'm thinking of those awful romantic comedies where the hero's adorable and saccharine-sweet kids suddenly show up partway through just for a quick cameo to show off his softer side) - without taking them into consideration when they're showing the rest of their character's lifestyle. (On the other hand, I'm such a dog nut that if an author gives the protagonist a realistic dog, believably integrated into their lifestyle, I'll forgive a whole multitude of other flaws, just for the dog's sake! It's one of the things I love about Jenny Crusie's novels, and it sold me on Agatha Christie's By the Pricking of my Thumbs despite various other issues I had with the novel. I am a total sucker that way.)

I love how sometimes good things pop up just when you least expect them. We've wanted for a long, long time to go back to Stockholm, and more particularly, we really wanted to go there this summer. Last time we went, in mid-autumn, we stayed in the perfect hotel for a Stockholm visit - the Nordic Sea Hotel (home of the famous ice bar! :) ), just next to the train station, only ten minutes' walk from the gorgeous Winter Palace and Old Town, and serving the best breakfast buffets either of us had ever eaten. So last month I confidently looked up flights - they were reasonable - then sailed over to the Nordic Sea Hotel's website.

Aaack. Not reasonable. Not even dreamably affordable, not in a million years. Aack, aack.

A couple of good friends helped by sending me lists of beds & breakfasts and holiday-lets in Stockholm, and I looked them up, but even then, I couldn't figure out a way to make the finances work out. Just this morning I was telling my youngest brother very sadly that there was no way we'd be able to afford Stockholm this summer, or any other European city, either. Then an hour later, I looked in my email. It turns out that KLM airlines is hosting a one-week super sale on European city trips, including flight/hotel combos. Out of sheer stubbornness, I clicked on "Stockholm, flight + hotel", waited to see how awful the total would be...

And my jaw dropped open. There was the Nordic Sea Hotel, with the flight and travel insurance combined, coming out to less than we'd paid for the hotel alone, two years ago when we visited off-season.

I phoned Patrick, tried not to pierce his eardrum with my excited eeeek'ing, and clicked "BOOK NOW!" before anything could go wrong. And we're booked! We're leaving June 5th for just under a week in Stockholm, staying at our favorite hotel, and I can't wait.

I think I'm even happier about it now than I would have been a month ago, back when it hadn't even occurred to me that it might not be possible. Thank you, KLM!!!!

Woot! My short story "Stitching Time" has just been republished in the very cool 'zine Diet Soap, Issue No. 2 (Sex & Gender), edited by Doug Lain and M. K. Hobson. I loved reading M. K. Hobson's launch party report - especially because it turned out (surprisingly but pleasingly to me) that I was a virtual participant in it: Mary read "Stitching Time" out loud as part of the party! (I've always wanted to go to Portland, but have never yet made it out there - at least now my story has made the trip for me.) You can buy a printed copy of the zine or else email the editors at "info (at) dietsoap (dot) org" for a free pdf copy. (Make sure you remember to let them know if you want a bookletized or on-screen version!) I'm really looking forward to reading the full issue.

And it's been a good story week in general, since last night I wrote the first 800 words of a brand-new short story, my first new story in about 5 months. It's one of my very few science fiction stories, it's very light and frothy, and I'm having a lot of fun with it so far.

Right now the sky is clouded over outside for the first time in days, but it's still beautiful weather - warm enough to wear sandals outside, but with a deliciously cool breeze. Apparently in this past week England has had hotter weather than either Greece or Spain. I have been feeling disgustingly smug about this, since I'd been so jealous of the people who could afford to escape to Mediterranean climates this spring! Now if only there were a lake or ocean closer to us, for swimming purposes...ah well. I still haven't made up my mind where we're going to go on my birthday, in just a couple of weeks. I definitely want to do a day trip somewhere, but I haven't decided whether it should be to a castle, a Georgian house museum, or an ocean. Hmmm...all nice options.

Now back to writing! :)

It's funny, being American - I know, of course, most of the different countries and ethnicities/religions that my various ancestors came from, but apart from the occasional bit that's filtered through to my own generation (klezmer music as a familiar background sound, the occasional Croatian phrase that I picked up from my grandfather, etc.), and my own occasional writing-homages to my heritage (I've written several fantasy stories using Croatian folklore specifically because of my very-much-loved Croatian relatives), I tend to forget how much influence those genetic inheritances can have in my predominantly American identity.

Today I watched the BBC Young Musician of the Year: 2008 Grand Final round of the competition. The first performer, an amazing guitarist named Jadran Duncombe, came on - and wow, did he look a lot like my youngest brother, especially in his hair and facial structure. Guess what? He's also part-Croatian, just like us. Then after Jadran's performance, the presenter interviewed his brother Emil - and at the first glance I thought: that is my brother! The second glance was enough to prove I was wrong - in fact there were an awful lot of differences in their faces - but it was a shock anyway...and a big reminder of how much we're shaped by the people who came before us in our families, no matter how distant their home countries might be from where we are now.

And speaking of the past, I spent a huge portion of this weekend devouring the best and most fun book I've read in a long, long time: Agatha Christie's An Autobiography. I picked it up at the library only out of random (and fairly mild) curiosity, but ended up adoring it. I'm not a particular fan of autobiographies in general, but this one was wonderfully witty, often hilarious, and absolutely full of fascinating details of social history, wonderfully told. I spent the weekend reading it almost non-stop, pausing only to read particularly funny bits out loud to Patrick, who's also planning to read it now, based on those excerpts.

I'm already planning to buy myself a copy just for the pleasure of re-reading, but if I ever want to write a book or story set in England between 1890-1930, I will be going back to it and taking hundreds of notes! She includes exactly the kinds of details of clothing, furniture, social customs, etc., that writers of historical fiction desperately need and often can't find - and does it all so entertainingly that I couldn't stop reading until I was finished, Sunday morning. I've never enjoyed an autobiography so much - it's definitely, definitely worth reading, if there's anyone else who hasn't read it yet!

What Is Your Battle Cry?

Zang! Who is that, skulking across the terrain! It is Stephanieburgis, hands clutching a burning branch! And with a mighty howl, her voice cometh: "For the love of beatings, I pillage like the world's mightiest bad-ass!!"

Find out! Enter username: Are you a girl, or a guy ?

created by beatings : powered by monkeys

In point of fact, I'm feeling remarkably relaxed and non-martial at the moment - it's a gorgeous, summery day, I've written a thousand words of Kat, and best of all, I spent a wonderful half hour this afternoon lying on the grass in the beautiful forested valley near our house, surrounded by bluebells and huge, leafy oak trees, soaking up sunshine and purring with contentment. But it's always good to have a battle cry as a fallback, just in case... ;)

Can I just say how very, very happy Jezebel Magazine's Fine Lines columns make me? In each column, Lizzie Skurnick revisits a beloved YA novel from her teenage years, with a lot of wit, a bit of snark, and a huge dollop of nostalgia...and since I'm guessing we must be somewhere around the same age, in almost every single case she's chosen to talk about a book I also read as a teen. Most of them are books I loved at the time (even the ones that make me wince nowadays!), but many of them are ones I'd completely forgotten about until reading the columns. This morning, after my writing session, I caught up on the last several "Fine Lines" columns, about EL Konigsburg's The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Lois Duncan's A Gift of Magic, Madeleine L'Engle's The Moon by Night, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, and many more...which of course led into a huge session of searching my local library catalogue for old favorites (with, sigh, very little luck), adding a bunch of them to my Amazon wishlist...and generally feeling immersed in the nicest kind of nostalgia.

There's something about the books I read as a kid - I think I actually experienced them differently than I experience books now, in a sort of delirious joy of discovery (OMG, I can't believe these exist!). Even though I'm still an obsessive and addicted reader, my reading experience is qualitatively different now even with books I adore, and of course that gives me a lot of fondness for the books I read and loved as a kid, even the ones I'd find unreadable now. Fine Lines is just exactly the right kind of 80s/90s nostalgia for me, in a way that retro fashion trends and even the best Molly Ringwald movies just can't touch.

In other, more up-to-date news, though: I forgot to mention yesterday that Christopher Barzak is one of the nominees for the Logo NewNowNext Awards 2008, and everyone and anyone can vote for him online! He's written some of my very favorite contemporary fantasy short stories of recent years, he's an amazing writer in general, and he won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel in 2008 for his novel One for Sorrow. Plus, let's have some genre pride - he's one of the only spec fic authors nominated for this award. Show him some support! You can vote for him here. (And if you want some extra persuasion, check out his wonderful stories in the Strange Horizons Archives - "Plenty" is my personal favorite of his stories, but I've never not liked a story by him.)

I just wanted to point out Patrick's very cool new blog series on how to plan good websites for writers. In his day job, Patrick is a professional web developer for the University of Leeds, so this is the kind of thing he thinks about for a living - which is something I've found intensely useful for my own web usage! (And not just because he designed and coded my website for free. :) ) Check out his first entry here!

Via sartorias - I would be in SO much trouble if our local Borders ever instituted this rule!


We had a lovely loooooong weekend, since yesterday was a UK national holiday (celebrating May Day, er, just a few days late). Lots and lots of trips to the bookstore, and yes, three different books read in full, over chocolate cream frappucinos and Signature hot chocolates. Since I have an incurable addiction to reading, and can only afford to spend £25 a month on fun stuff like books (going down to £20 next month, when our rent goes up), the Borders café, along with our local library, is a total godsend. (And I should also add that those free café reads have frequently led to me buying books by new-to-me authors - I'll read their first book over hot chocolate, then buy several more with my next month's treat money.)

It was a great reading weekend in general, actually. Sunday night I had a really vivid, lovely dream about Carrie Jones's novel Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend, which I hadn't read since January, so Monday morning I dug it out of one of our many piles of books (they've colonized the end room to a scary degree) and have been re-reading it ever since with huge enjoyment. I'm about 30 pages from the end now, and just got the second half of my monthly Amazon order, with Poison Sleep and Lace and Blade. They both look like so much fun, I think I'll have to flip a coin to see which I read first.

And absolutely best of all, I've finally given in and started to write the climax of Kat by Starlight - and I'm having so much fun with it. As much as it pains me to near the end, I'm having such a great time finally setting off all those clashing consequences at as high a speed as possible, making things completely impossible for poor Kat, and forcing her to rise to greater and greater heights of ingenuity to cope with them. It's really mean of me to laugh when my characters are in trouble, but I am having so much fun revealing more and more unexpected and horrifying results of her and her sister's clever (or crazy) schemes and methods earlier in the book. Of course, Kat will save the day in the end...but she's not having an easy time of it in the meantime!

I finished Chapter Nineteen this morning, and now I'm taking a rice krispies-and-internet break, while Maya sleeps on top of my legs. It's a beautiful, warm day outside, so in an hour or so, we'll probably wander down the street to visit the baby horses, and then sit outside for a while to read in the sunshine (or, in Maya's case, to eat grass like a little horse herself).

Happy Tuesday!

I'm stuffed full of strawberry cream cake (with amazing mascarpone frosting) after a lovely afternoon spent in a friend's back yard, celebrating her baby's first birthday with a bunch of other friends and neighbors, all gathered and gossiping happily in the sunshine. Five-year-old boys clashed happily with rubber swords and laser guns, and several of the adult men in the crowd, including Patrick, gave in to temptation and made the little boys very happy by dueling with them with total enthusiasm. I ate my cake, laughed, talked, and loved watching the tournaments. Now I'm home re-reading Dorothy Sayers's Strong Poison while Patrick heats up lovely mattar paneer for dinner. Life is feeling really, really good right now. :)

It's always a strange experience to re-read a book for the first time in a long time. Some of the bits I love most this time are ones I passed over without much notice the last time through. This time, Miss Climpson's agency (a bit like Charlie's Angels, but 30+ years earlier and much, much cooler!) fills me with total joy. It's an agency run by the sort of elderly spinster who was totally disregarded and considered to be not only unimportant but nearly invisible in her 1930s society, and it's staffed entirely by other women from all ranges of life.

These women seemed to spend most of their time in answering advertisements. Unmarried gentlemen who desired to meet ladies possessed of competences with a view to matrimony; sprightly sexagenarians, who wanted housekeepers for remote country districts; ingenious gentlemen with financial schemes, on the look-out for capital; literary gentlemen, anxious for female collaborators; plausible gentlemen about to engage talent for production in the provinces; benevolent gentlemen, who could tell people how to make money in their spare time - gentlemen such as these were very liable to receive applications from members of Miss Climpson's staff. It may have been coincidence that these gentlemen so very often had the misfortune to appear shortly afterwards before the magistrate on charges of fraud, blackmail, or attempted procuration, but it is a fact that Miss Climpson's office boasted a private telephone line to Scotland Yard, and that few of her ladies were quite so unprotected as they appeared. It is also a fact that the money which paid for the rent and upkeep of the premises might, by zealous inquirers, have been traced to Lord Peter Wimsey's banking account.

Miss Climpson and her agents are SO awesome. And even the fact that the next line in the book is the totally ewwww-worthy:

His lordship was somewhat reticent about this venture of his, but occasionally, when closeted with Chief Inspector Parker or other intimate friends, referred to it as 'My Cattery'.

...only makes me think even more strongly how wonderful it would be to have (or to write!) a novel told entirely from the point of view of one of Miss Climpson's agents - a novel, and a mystery, in which Lord Peter is not involved at all. Not that I don't love the Lord Peter mysteries...but cool secret-detective-agent women in 1930, infiltrating bad guys' setups...how could you get any cooler than that?

On Thursday afternoon, the last time I wrote a journal entry, I was just fifty pages into Sandra McDonald's The Outback Stars. I was finished by bedtime that night, having gotten totally sucked in and needing to find out what happened, ASAP! And after a day of thinking about it afterwards, I'm ready to do my promised review.

I didn't read The Outback Stars when it first came out, because I'd seen it marketed as military science fiction, a genre that's never particularly appealed to me. As it turns out, it certainly is military SF; all the characters are in the military, which rules their lives and expectations and outlook on the world; and yet I really, really enjoyed it. It's not gun-blasting SF glorifying war or battle; in fact, there aren't any battles, and even though the heroine, Jodenny, is an enthusiastic, career-minded officer on a military ship, the situations she's in highlight all the issues that can go wrong with traditional military structures.

...None of which might have interested me all that much, normally. But The Outback Stars turned out to be a blend of a lot of things I do really enjoy in novels. There's a really interesting romance that's every bit as important as the SF plot (in fact, this book could really easily be cross-marketed to romance readers); and I was alternately reminded, in the best possible ways, of two of my favorite writers, Patrick O'Brian and Lois McMaster Bujold. This turned out to be the kind of space opera I really like, written in a character-based style that reminded me nicely of Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, and the shipboard dramas and issues were wonderfully reminiscent of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, set in the 18th-century British navy. (This grabbed me right from the beginning, when just like O'Brian's Captain Aubrey in Master and Commander, Jodenny is desperately searching for a ship to serve on, any ship at all...) The plot, which circles around missing equipment, possible smuggling, and mysterious alien technology, is fast-paced and lots of fun, and I liked the writing style a lot.

But the best part, for me, was the romance between Jodenny, a lieutenant, and Myell, a sergeant serving under her. There are plenty of romance plots, in multiple genres, where the alpha hero is Of A Higher Station In Life, whether he's a 19th-century nobleman falling in love with his ward's governess, or a CEO marrying his secretary, and lots of plots about lower-class women getting swept away by their upper-class lovers. This is one of the few romances I've read, though, where the woman is of a higher station than the man in an intensely hierarchical society - where she is literally more powerful than the hero, to the point that he is actually obligated to follow all of her commands.

Not only that, but Myell is being bullied in an intensely horrible and physical way by other men onboard ship in a way that makes him feel utterly helpless - a situation Jodenny is determined to help him with. It's not the typical alpha-male romance plot - and McDonald does a brilliant job with it. Myell is in a position of weakness in every respect, which affects their relationship dynamic in all sorts of ways, but he's also a really strong character, certainly her emotional and intellectual equal, and it's totally believable when Jodenny falls in love with him...which only makes the chemistry between them more awkward, as their romance is, due to their jobs, entirely off-limits.

I had a couple of quibbles throughout the book - the section in the middle where Jodenny ends up accidentally thrown into contact with Myell in a non-work situation felt a little awkward in its choreography to me, and I was confused by a couple of minor points at the very end, especially wondering exactly how one particular burning issue had been resolved (it clearly had been resolved off-screen; I just didn't quite understand it)...but those were very minor quibbles. All in all, this was a really fun read, and even though it's not in the SF subgenre I usually read, I'll definitely be buying the second book in the series.

It's a gorgeous spring day, and all the animals in the neighborhood are loving it. When we took Maya out for a walk this morning, she spent ages sniffing every single daffodil we passed - if we hadn't insisted on bringing her back home, she'd still be there now, luxuriating in all the spring smells! There are four mother-foal pairs in the nearby field now, and two of the little foals were galloping around the field when we passed, looking wobbly and awkward but full of joy in their own newfound ability to run.

And since it is a new month, I got to make my monthly Amazon order, which is always one of my favorite monthly events. I'm really looking forward to finally getting Tim Pratt's Poison Sleep and also Lace and Blade, an anthology that looks like exactly my cup of tea. (Elegant romantic fantasy swashbucklers? Oh, yeah!) I had a nice arrival in the mail yesterday, too - a free copy of Sandra McDonald's The Outback Stars, which I won on her blog in exchange for a promise to review it, whether for good or ill, on my own blog when I finish it. I'm only fifty pages in so far, so I'm nowhere near ready to review it, but I will say that so far it's an awful lot of fun, and refreshingly different from any of the other books I've been reading lately.

Apart from that, there's not much news. I've had a couple of quiet, nice days, full of reading, Maya-cuddling, and putting the final polish on several stories that have been needing revision for far, far too long. With luck, the last of them should be heading out by the end of next week, which will feel great...and then I'll have absolutely no excuse to avoid writing the climax to Kat by Starlight! Fooey. I hate writing novel climaxes, because it means that the novels are DONE! (Well, done for a first draft value of "done", anyway. But first drafts are always my favorite to write, and I never want them to end!) Luckily, my short-story-revising break has been long enough now that I'm really missing Kat, so I'm actually looking forward to hitting that point, despite feeling wistful about nearing the end.

Ooh, and one very cool discovery I made yesterday: one of my very favorite British fantasy writers, Freda Warrington, has just started a blog on livejournal! Her novel The Court of the Midnight King is one of the most fun historical fantasies I've ever read, an alternate history Richard III novel full of magic and darkness and romance, and I was lucky enough to read an early draft of her contemporary fantasy novel Elfland, which is due out from Tor in 2009, and which is lushly-written, really original and totally lovely. Plus, she's a wonderful person as well as a wonderful writer. (Such a nice coincidence when both of those things happen to be true!) So: check out her new blog! :)

Lots of wonderful links around the internet right now! Carrie Jones is hosting a contest to give away a hardcover copy of her new novel, Love and Other Uses for Duct Tape, as well as a paperback copy of her first novel, Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend (which I LOVED). Needless to say, I was always going to enter that contest, because I'm desperate to get a copy of Love... and it's not available on amazon.co.uk...but what makes this particular contest the most fun is that she's challenged every entrant to reveal a guilty pleasure read (or several!) in order to be entered. So I outed myself on the trilogy I found myself obsessed by all last week (to the horror of my inner literary snob!), as well as an older and much, much more embarrassing love...and I'm encouraging everyone else to do it, too, because it's been so much fun reading other people's comments! Go and play on Carrie's blog.

And via Justina Robson, I just discovered a great online article by Richard Morgan on the sheer craziness and absurdity of all the flame-throwing, hierarchical wars within the science fiction and fantasy genre. Here's one of my favorite bits:

So you want to write Mundane SF. Good idea -- go away and do it; if Geoff Ryman's Air is anything to go by, something resembling Mundane SF might -- eventually -- win the genre its first Booker prize. But why the crushing need to denigrate the space opera end of SF before you start? What's with the superior attitude? Oh, and you guys -- before you start looking all smug 'n' shit behind this -- so you lot don't want to write (or read) mundane SF. Fine -- don't. But is it so terribly threatening when someone else does, that you have to vomit up this ocean of rage and abuse, as if the Mundanistas had come out suggesting re-education camps for the Star Trek fanbase. Is the Mundane manifesto really such an affront that established authors (who really should know better) and fans alike have to start hurling abuse around like they're a street gang and someone said something dirty about their mothers?

And while we're at it, all you self-professed New Weirdsters - did nailing your New Weird colours to the mast five years ago really have to mean such an avowed and out loud contempt for all that painstakingly imagined (and yes, mapped!) "consolatory" fantasy and those who like to immerse themselves in it? Was that the only way the manifesto could stand -- in fake-defiant from-the-barricades revolution-chic opposition to something else? Did there -- does there always -- have to be an enemy? Do we have to hate before we can get passionate about what we're doing? Or was it just a sneaking suspicion that those "consolatory" guys were going to steal readership share?

You can read the whole article here. Having been pretty horrified myself by some of the barricade-building I've seen just in the last few years (science fiction is worthier than fantasy! grim books are worthier than cheerful books! happy endings are escapist crap! etc., etc., et-mind-numbing-cetera), I really, really enjoyed it.

I woke up today feeling way, way more human than I had since Thursday night. Knock on wood, I think the migraine has finally Left The Building. Whew!

And my return to normal life was marked by a nice discovery (via lisamantchev): Rich Horton included my Strange Horizons story "Locked Doors" in his Virtual Best of the Year - 2007 recommended reading list. (It was in some pretty awesome company, too!)

Not much else to report, since my weekend was devoured by the Migraine From Hell. The best side-effect was that I did a lot of reading, and right now I'm re-reading Sarah Monette's The Bone Key, which continues to be one of my very favorite short story collections. It's also a great example of how to do a lot of writing challenges right, which ties into something I spent a lot of this weekend thinking about.

As writers, a lot of us want to use gorgeous language and give our readers pleasure from the sheer style of our writing, but it's even more important for me as a reader to have a strong emotional connection with the characters themselves, or to find some other immediate compulsion that absorbs me and pulls me into the story. That's why there are a couple of writers I admire tremendously for their use of language, but whose books I just can't read - despite the drop-dead, beautiful style that makes me want to swoon, I'm never absorbed in the actual story or the characters' dilemmas, I feel distanced from what's going on, and I eventually give up and put the book down, because really, life is Too Short. This happened again this weekend with a book I was trying again after a failed attempt last year. The language was so beautiful, I admired it so much...but I gave up on page 123, having pushed forward about 80 pages further than I'd managed on the first go-round.

On the other hand, there are plenty of writers whose books I'll willingly read for the great stories and characters, but whose writing style feels awkward or haphazard to me. (In those cases, I don't tend to put the book down, because I still want to find out What Happens...but I won't often re-read those books, either.) My personal ideal is the kind of writer whose language thrills me AND whose stories scoop me up and pull me along, right there with the characters, and Sarah Monette is one of the authors who does this best: beautiful writing mingled a sense of immediacy and passion and compulsive storytelling that never lets me stop.

What about you guys? What matters most to you? Do you care about the language/style? Alternately, do you even care if there's much of a story/character-hook, so long as the language is gorgeous? And which would you rather do without, beautiful writing or compelling storytelling?

Ouch, ouch, ouch. I only get migraines very, very rarely, but I've had the worst one yet ever since Thursday night. Today, for the first time since then, I've felt better enough for a couple of very, very brief sessions on the computer - just long enough to type in revisions to one story, send it out, start to write some of the emails I owe, and then give up in face of my head's VERY pointed protests. So I'm getting back off again now, but just wanted to let everyone know - I swear I'm not ignoring emails, it just really, really hurts to look at a computer screen right now.

Back soon, I hope!

In honor of the 2nd Annual Pixel-Stained Techopeasant Day, I'd like to share my short-short story "Foxwoman", which has always been one of my personal favorites. It's also my tribute to all the Swedish folklore and history I love (and if you own any Swedish folk-rock music, by bands like Hedningarna or Garmarna, please feel free to crank it up as you read! :) ). It's just over 1000 words, and it was originally published in Aeon Magazine, Issue 8. Courtesy of Marti McKenna, I can even include the lovely original illustration.

Enjoy! :)

***

Foxwoman

By Stephanie Burgis


She’s lurking outside my campfire again.

Räven. Foxwoman.

I can hear her breathing, quick and eager, through the crackling of the fire. Sparks fly into the darkness.

She’s too clever to let me see the glow of her green eyes.

Every night for the past week, I’ve camped outside, caught between wavering hope and dark despair. I’ve chanted the incantations the old men of the village taught me, tossed their herbs of summoning into the fire. The flames burn hot, with a scent like the bittersweet beginning of autumn.

I catch the smell of musk, sharp and sudden behind me. I spin around--

Too late. I’m not even granted a glimpse of her copper tail, shimmering behind long human legs.

It must be a sign of madness, to want a woman this badly.

Other men tell tales of her sisters singing to them, as they walk back at night to the safety of home and hearth. They cover their ears to keep their feet moving toward the women and children who wait for them, counting on their fidelity. They stumble into their warm houses and slam the doors behind them with relief. But their dreams are haunted for long nights after by teeth and claws and the scent of the wild. They wake, shivering, to hear branches tapping steadily on their windowsills, while their wives sleep quietly in bed beside them.

It’s hard to live in the woods again, after years riding the longships to glory and battle. At sea, you can see clearly for miles around you. Here, the trees surround you, whisper to you, trap you...and predatory eyes watch from the thick, leafy darkness.

( Click to read the rest of the story. )

Lately I've been finding myself listening obsessively to my opera CDs. And not my 18th-century comic opera favorites, either - no, I've been listening to and melting over all the huge, overblown 19th-century romantic opera arias and duets that I used to primly think (back when I was younger and way, way more uptight in my musical tastes) were just Too Over The Top. Not anymore! There are a couple of Renée Fleming CDs I've had on near constant repeat lately, and right now I'm listening to the Duets album by Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon, with duets from La bohéme, Lucia di Lammermoor and many more achingly tragic romances. I'm not sure what all this yen for throbbing romantic music means...but it's definitely not reflected in my current writing project, since (despite the many romantic subplots in her books) Kat is absolutely and unflinchingly skeptical of any and all tragic romance storylines. Hmm. Last year, when I went through a similar period of Romantic Opera Addiction, I wrote a big, tragic, romantic vampiress story set in Revolutionary Paris. Maybe something equally musically appropriate will occur to me soon...and in the meantime, at least I'm hearing a lot of truly gorgeous music.

Today has been half-productive and half...er...decidedly not. On the plus side, I finally spent forty minutes wrestling with our recalcitrant and creaky old scanner (which can only be operated through our old desktop, which is so ancient itself that it can't be connected to our wireless network and has neither a ZIP drive nor a CD writer, which makes transferring files...tricky, to say the least!) so that I could finally scan in some signed short story contracts that have been waiting for a while. Oh, and I came up with a dinner plan for tonight and made a list of missing ingredients...and spent a lovely half-hour sitting with Maya in the sunshine outside, chatting with a nice local builder who's just taken in a really beautiful and gentle young, stray pitbull who showed up in his yard last week. It was a really cheering conversation, and very redeeming of my faith in humanity.

The dog, D, is drop-dead gorgeous, with a stunning red-and-brown coat, and he absolutely loves people, but he could very easily have been put to sleep when he was found stray, as a lot of shelters won't take pitbulls, and if the man and his wife had just dropped him off at the police station (normal procedure), he would have been put to sleep after seven days of not being claimed. Instead, they alerted the police, took out an advertisement in the paper, did everything they could to spread the news and let the original owners know...and are now planning to adopt him if no one does come forward. We had a really nice chat about dogs, vets, and good places for obedience training in the local area. (The original owners obviously hadn't trained him, making him a nightmare to walk, as a big strong dog with a will of his own...which only reinforces the idea that he may have been intentionally left stray. About 2/3 of dogs who are abandoned at shelters in America and England have never had any training at all, and so the owners, who weren't willing to put in that initial work, call them "impossible to live with" and abandon them...it's one of those statistics that makes me grit my teeth.) It was a really good conversation, and it left me in a great mood. Sadly, the man hasn't had a chance to test D with other dogs in a safe and controlled social situation, so he sensibly decided it was safest not to let him meet Maya, but the two dogs wiggled at each other from a distance and whined with frustration at not being allowed to play.

On the other hand...on the utterly non-productive front, I haven't written a word of Kat by Starlight yet, and it's nearly 5pm. Urk! Time to get down to work, with an apple and a chunk of strong cheddar as energy-givers. I just can't let the music I'm listening to affect the mood of what I'm writing, or else Kat will end up with a serious case of tonal whip-lash...

It's a beautifully warm, breezy spring day today, exactly the kind of weather that makes me remember why I like our neighborhood. Daffodils are blooming all along our block, little white daisies have popped up on every green surface, the horses in the farm down the road are all frolicking with each other in total spring-madness, and in the field at the bottom of our block, there are two different sets of mother-horses grazing with their baby colts, who are fuzzy and awkward and almost unbearably beautiful. On the one hand, weather like this makes me yearn for our own yard so I could sit outside in it and bask; on the other hand, since we don't have a yard of our own, we have to walk Maya up and down the block several times a day, and in today's weather, that's pure bliss. A couple hours ago, Maya and I walked to the end of the block, spent a while watching the baby colts with their moms (Maya loves horses; if it weren't for the fence around the field, she'd be trying to lick their faces), then walked back home...and thought, no, why go inside? So instead we spent another 20 minutes sitting on the bench outside the 18th-century schoolroom across the street from our cottage, and I felt purely happy.

(It was a lucky day for Maya, too; a dog-loving neighbor happened to pass by while we were sitting there, and she got a full-on cuddle session from him. She was wagging for several minutes afterwards!)

We're also starting to think about a summer vacation, which is always fun. What we'd really love to do is spend a week back in Stockholm. Last time, when we went in the autumn, we got a great deal at the Nordic Sea Hotel, which is in a perfect location just by the central train & subway station, offers phenomenal breakfast buffets, and even has a ridiculously fun ice bar. (See photographic evidence!) The prices weren't bad at all. Unfortunately, what we discovered when we got online this weekend is that that was a total fluke of autumn sales. Sigh. So...no Nordic Sea Hotel for us this year, but I'm spending today on intensive googling and link-following to try to find some more affordable options. For various reasons, this is definitely the year for us to take a romantic European city-break, and darn it, we both love Stockholm. It's got to work out somehow!

But in the meantime, rare and beautiful sunshine is streaming through the windows, Maya's snoozing on top of two different toys, and I definitely need to get back outside. :)

1) After months and months of struggle and irritation and total failure to catch a single one of the mice in our house, this weekend we've caught six. The weirdest thing is that we're using exactly the same traps as we did before - and a good thing too, since they're multi-mouse humane traps that hold more than one at a time, so Friday morning we discovered four mice in one trap, all grooming each other and chowing down on the food we'd left inside. They were all, needless to say, adorable. We drove out to leave them a couple miles away in a forest, and they hopped out and hid, all together, underneath the leaves of a wild garlic plant. Every morning since then, we've released one of their brothers or sisters into the same location. I really hope they find each other again. (And please, please don't remind me of how dangerous the wild is for housemice. I can't even bear to think about it. We couldn't let them stay in our house...but if it weren't for their breeding capabilities, we'd have been very tempted just to buy an enormous cage with runs and games for them and keep them as pets. They are so incredibly cute.)

2) This morning I wrote about 2,000 words of Kat by Starlight, the most I've written in one go since the end of Kat by Moonlight. Woot! Of course, the funny thing is, I know that for many writers this would be a bare minimum of a daily wordcount (or not even that)...but for me it's nearing burn-out levels, too much to do regularly. The other week, someone posted that anyone who wants to be a pro writer has to be ready to write at least 2,000 new words a day, and I had a near nervous breakdown. It took a lot of chocolate and reminders of all the pro writers I know who don't do those wordcounts before I calmed down about the whole thing. In the meantime, though, the novel is going really well, and I'm having fun with it.

3) kazdreamer tagged me with a book meme. Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment to whoever tagged you once you've posted your three sentences.

So here we go! The closest book to me is a research book, Georgette Heyer's Regency World, by Jennifer Kloester. (It's great because it's filled with wonderful and useful Regency detail, but it all just feels to me like gossip because she constantly references the characters in Heyer's novels.) And the three sentences are:

Established in 1762, Boodle's (28 St. James Street) had originally been started as a club at 50 Pall Mall by William Almack, the founder of Almack's. Originally known as the 'Savoir Vivre' it was eventually named after the manager Edward Boodle. In later years Boodle's moved into a fine Adam-style building in St James's Street on the original site of White's club.

Not an exciting clip, maybe, but it is a really good book.

Because everyone I know is frantically busy right now, I'm going to break the last rule of the meme and let people tag themselves. Do let me know if you choose to be tagged - I love seeing all the different books people are reading!

Hurray! My short-short story "Giant" has been re-published as an audio podcast on the new fantasy podcast, Podcastle. It's about 6 minutes long, and you can listen to it (or download it) for free.

...Which makes it perfect timing that I can now announce some news I've been really happy about (but haven't been able to make public) for a while: "Giant" is also going to be reprinted soon in the upcoming Lone Star Stories anthology The Lone Star Stories Reader! The ToC is pretty amazing:

1. An introduction by Sherwood Smith;
2. “Wolf Night” by Martha Wells;
3. “Seasonal Work” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman;
4. “‘Janet, Meet Bob’” by Gavin J. Grant;
5. “The Great Conviction of Tia Inez” by M. Thomas;
6. “Angels of a Desert Heaven” by Marguerite Reed;
7. “The Disemboweler” by Ekaterina Sedia;
8. “A Night in Electric Squidland” by Sarah Monette;
9. “Thread: A Triptych” by Catherynne M. Valente;
10. “The Frozen One” by Tim Pratt;
11. “Dragon Hunt” by Sarah Prineas;
12. “Manuscript Found Written in the Paw Prints of a Stoat” by Samantha Henderson;
13. “Giant” by Stephanie Burgis;
14. “When the Rain Comes” by Josh Rountree;
15. “The Hangman Isn’t Hanging” by Jay Lake; and
16. “The Oracle Opens One Eye” by Patricia Russo.

I can't wait to get my contributor copies! I read and loved many of those stories in the magazine when they were originally published; others are new to me but written by authors I love, and I can't wait to read them for the first time. (I'm not sure when exactly the anthology will be published, but I think it will probably be sometime this year.) The full details are on editor Eric Marin's blog.

It's been a great start to my Saturday, all in all. :)

If border collies ever develop opposable thumbs, the world will be in a lot of trouble.

Maya has always gotten super-excited whenever Patrick comes home from a day at work. She always, always knows when it's him, she always races ahead of me to get to the door first (then comes running back to hurry me up if I take too long). Since we're operating on one functional house key right now (we keep forgetting to get it copied when we're at the mall), I have to unlock the door and let him in every time. Maya always used to bounce with excitement as she waited. But recently I've noticed something different. Now, she jumps up for the door handle, pushing at it with her paws.

Of course, nothing happens, because dogs' paws just don't work that way. But she's definitely got the system figured out. And if she ever finds a substitution for opposable thumbs...well, really, what could stand in a smart and committed border collie's way?

In non-dog news, I wrote 1300 words of Kat by Starlight this morning - hooray! - and I came across two fun links. First, a species of turtle that was thought to be extinct has reappeared in Vietnam - so cool! - and second (via kazdreamer), Elizabeth Gilbert has posted a wonderful essay on writing. Here's one of my favorite bits:

The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

Really, really good advice.